Comments on: The World Hardest Languages to Learn

By: Simon Critchley Interview (Episode 3) (02) | Famous Philosophers

Simon Critchley Interview (Episode 3) (02) | Famous Philosophers — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 08:23:03 +0000

[...] Worlds Hardest Languages to Learn | Crystal Kiss [...]

By: Yalbo

Yalbo — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 20:45:22 +0000

There is no “Chinese” language. There are various dialects among which 2 are the most popular, that being Cantonese and Mandarin. Geez, learn your basics before you start talking things people…

By: Tom

Tom — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 03:52:13 +0000

I’m a pole and if goes on the Polish language the last sentence is a rubbish. When I was 7 I was very talkative and I see now how talkative is my nephew who has got 10 and he has a very large realm of words. Children who have got 5 talk normal. In description of language they forgot one more thing – we have also a cases of adjectives in respect of the nouns I agree, compare with english is a very very very complicated …

By: Otto

Otto — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 22:51:14 +0000

i’m dutch, polish is very hard to learn

By: lolcatz

lolcatz — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 02:35:56 +0000

hey, let`s at least try to be cool headed. IMO this article somehow misses one point – our latin roots.
i always thought – it`s much easier to learn european languages, because we are europeans.
grammar basics and some vocabulary are common for all of our languages.
for example – cases. polish has 7 cases, AFAIR latin had 6, german has 4 – and that makes some difficulties.
however – i found german pronouns much more difficult than anything else. noun+pronoun, declined by person, case, number, defined-undefined, strong-weak declination…and great number of exemptions to the rules.

all in all – it`s a piece of cake to learn any new latin based language, after one mastered 3
as for the eastern ones – it`s just another cup of tea.
general idea of language use is different. graphic signs instead of uniform alphabet. utter importance of tones while speaking, etc..
i find chineese a very beautiful language to speak, very melodic, like russian. but mastering it seems just pain in the …back =)

By: Zyx

Zyx — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 20:27:55 +0000

A suggestion for the administrator: you can safely delete most of the comments written only in Polish (especially those written with capital letters), because they are quite primitive and rude “jokes” of some kids.

Anyway, the language difficulty depends on who is telling it. Czech and Slovak people can find Polish language easier to learn than English because of many similarities between them. The number of endings is not a big problem, because they are relatively simple to learn, if someone tries to speak and read the foreign text. The hardest part is always a different grammar structure semantics: if you are familiar with Slavic cases, you will probably have no problems with mastering Polish ones. If you are Japanese and Polish is your first indoeuropean language, well…

By: Jorge

Jorge — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 04:15:38 +0000

Spanish correctly spoken or written can be hard too. We also have 3 genders and many verb conjugations plus regular and irregular ones. ex. what in english would be:

I play, you play, he plays, we play, you play they play we say yo juego, tu juegas, el juega, nosotros juagamos, vosotros jugais, ellos juegan (all different).

By: Z Warszawy

Z Warszawy — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:25:16 +0000

“In English: two, twain, twice, second, secondary, double, both, pair, binary, latter”

All the 28 words Przemek gave should be translated into “two” or “second”. “Twain” could be compared to “dual number” (apart from singular and plurar). The rest would (at least could) be translated to Polish differently (dwukrotnie, drugorz?dny, podwójny, obaj, para, binarny, ostatni – just the basic forms).

I agree that English is full of idioms or grammatical tricks. Imagine Polish has even more.

In one thing English is hrder than Polish: people use different dialects, which are often not easy to understand.

By: amie 137

amie 137 — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 16:39:12 +0000

There about 28 forms of the word for number “two” in polish:

dwa, dwaj, dwie, dwoje, dwóch, dwóm, dwom, dwu, dwoma, dwiema, dwojga, dwojgu, dwojg?, dwójka, dwójk?, dwójki, dwójce, dwójkiem, dwójko, dwójgo dwojgiem, drugi, druga, drugie, drugiemu, drugiej, drugiego, drugim, drug?

no other country in the world has more it it must be the hardest!!

By: Batman

Batman — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 14:26:07 +0000

I’m from Poland and I can’t agree with that sentence:
“The average Polish speaker is fluent in their language not until age 16.”
That’s not true, 6-8 years old children can speak fluently Polish. Of course, they make some mistakes and don’t use sophisticated vocabulary, because those people learn longer, but it doesn’t mean, that they don’t speak fluently.
Written Polish is more difficult and people make more mistatakes in it, it takes more time to learn in.